No parent wants a disabled son, says father accused of abandoning child with Down’s Syndrome

The Australian couple accused of abandoning their surrogate baby in Thailand have admitted they would have preferred to abort the boy, who has Down’s syndrome, because “no parent wants a son with a disability”.

In their first public comments since it emerged that they had left the boy called Gammy and returned to Australia with his healthy twin sister, David and Wendy Farnell said that they had learnt of his condition too late to terminate and now wanted him back.

“If it would have been safe for the embryo to have been terminated, we probably would have terminated it,” Farnell said.

However, holding back tears, Farnell denied in an interview on Australian television that the couple had abandoned the baby: “I don’t think any parent wants a son with a disability. [But] no, we never abandoned him. No, we never said to the surrogate mother to have an abortion.

“We didn’t give up on him. The surrogate mother wanted to take our girl. And we were scared we were going to lose her. So we had to try and get out of there as fast as we could.”

The separation of six-month-old Gammy from his twin sister, called Pipah, has made headlines around the world and fuelled concerns about the oversight of international commercial surrogacy.

The case took an additional twist when it emerged that Farnell, 56, an electrician, had a history of child sex offences.

Asked whether he was fit to be a father, Farnell, said he “hangs my head in shame” over his crimes but no longer had sexual urges towards children.

“I am not going to harm my little girl,” he said. “She [Pipah] will be 100 per cent safe because I know I will do everything in the world to protect my little girl. I have no inclinations … They have 100 per cent stopped. I don’t have this urge to do anything anymore.”

Farnell was jailed in 1997 for sex offences involving three girls aged five, seven and 10 from the early 1980s to 1993.

He has three children from a previous marriage and is now married to a Chinese woman, Wendy Li, whom he met through an online dating service in 2004. She said she had always known about her husband’s offences but stood by him and did not believe he would ever harm their daughter. “He is a good husband a good father, a very very good son,” she said.

The hour-long interview yesterday appeared only to add to tensions between the couple and Pattharamon Janbua, the 21-year-old surrogate mother, who claims they abandoned Gammy and refused to touch or look at him in hospital.

After learning last night that the Farnells wanted to seek custody of Gammy, Pattharamon, a mother of two, claimed that the egg used in the fertilization process was not supplied by Farnell but belonged to another Thai woman hired by the surrogacy agency.

“They are not really related with the baby … I am not really sure they will give real love to Gammy’s sister,” she told Fairfax Media.

The Farnells have gone into hiding in their home town of Bunbury in Western Australia since it emerged that they left Gammy in Thailand. They eventually agreed to an interview with Nine Network’s Sixty Minutes, which says it has not paid them but will make a donation to a fund to help to care for the boy.

Farnell said the couple fled Thailand with their daughter because they were worried that Pattharamon was planning to keep her.

“We miss our little boy,” he said. “She [Pattharamon] said that if we try to take our little boy, she’s going to get the police and she’s going to come and take our little girl.?.?. and she’s going to keep both of the babies.”

Farnell said he sometimes returned home from work to find that his wife had dressed their daughter in blue because she wanted to remember Gammy.

Farnell said: “We miss him every day. We just want to get our son but we don’t know who can help us.”

Child protection authorities in Australia revealed last week they are reviewing the suitability of the couple to be parents and will consider removing the daughter. Asked about that possibility, Farnell began to cry, spluttering “I hope to God she won’t be” before becoming incoherent.

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